You graduated last year, and your work has already been featured by National Geographic and showcased at the Natural History Museum in London’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. How did you first get interested in wildlife photography?
I grew up in the Bay Area, and both my parents loved the outdoors. In 2015, I traveled to Alaska with my dad on a lifelong dream of mine—to see brown bears fishing for salmon.
I borrowed my dad’s camera and took my first-ever wildlife photos. Before I knew it, I was hooked. I was 13 at the time. When I returned to California, all I wanted to do was keep photographing wildlife. I spent nearly every day after school and on weekends hiking in the hills near my home, photographing bobcats, foxes, and other animals.
When I was 14, I found a female bobcat in a park near my home, and I watched her throughout high school and early college. Every spare hour I had, I would go looking for her. Some days, I spent the entire day with her—from sunrise to sunset. That experience shaped me in a profound way.
You’re also part of the inaugural class of the California Academy of Sciences’ Creators for Nature program, which I believe was instrumental in photographing the Mount Lyell shrew for the first time.
As part of this program, we were granted special project funding. When we came up with the idea to study the Mount Lyell shrew, I knew it would have been very difficult to find funding elsewhere. It’s a highly unconventional, high-risk project; there was a strong chance we wouldn’t even succeed because of how rare this species is.
Traditional funding sources often wouldn’t support a project like this, but I reached out to the California Academy of Sciences, and they agreed to let me use my special project funding for it.
Along with a team from the UC Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, you spent three nights camping to photograph and study the Mount Lyell shrew, a species first discovered more than 100 years ago. Why has it never been photographed before? Is it just because they are hard to find?
I actually wouldn’t say they’re that hard to find. We caught a Mount Lyell shrew within the first two hours of setting traps—before we had even baited them. But the reason this species had never been photographed alive comes down to two main factors.
First, shrews have incredibly fast metabolisms. If they don’t eat for more than two hours, they can die. In the past, when mammalogists went out to study mammals in the Sierra Nevada, they weren’t targeting shrews specifically. They set traps for a range of small mammals and typically checked them the next morning. Since there was no reason to keep the shrews alive, every Mount Lyell shrew previously caught was found dead.
For our expedition, we never slept for more than two hours at a time. We wanted to photograph and film them while ensuring their survival, so we checked the traps frequently, which allowed us to catch and document them alive.
The second reason is that people generally don’t pay much attention to shrews—especially the Mount Lyell shrew.
Why do you think that is?
When it comes to conservation funding, it often goes toward charismatic species like mountain lions and wolves. Animals like shrews simply don’t receive the same level of attention, care, or resources.
One of the goals of our project—beyond photographing and raising awareness for the Mount Lyell shrew—was to challenge how we allocate resources in conservation. We need to broaden the conversation and pay more attention to overlooked species.
Our expedition was tough, but actually finding and photographing the Mount Lyell shrew wasn’t incredibly difficult. We caught six of them. That fact alone speaks volumes—it’s not that they’re impossible to find, it’s that no one has been paying attention. That’s what we’re trying to change with our work.
Shrews play a crucial role as insectivores. In fact, they can consume nearly 100% of the insect biomass in a given area within a month. If a species like the Mount Lyell shrew disappears, it could disrupt ecosystems. But even if it doesn’t cause cascading effects, losing this species would still be a loss of biodiversity. If we view biodiversity as inherently valuable, then every lost species represents a loss to the ecosystem.
Why should we pay more attention to these overlooked species today?
If you look at global biodiversity loss, the majority of disappearing species aren’t the charismatic megafauna we hear about in the media. Instead, they’re invertebrates, plants, and small mammals—species we haven’t studied much and know little about. Because they remain undocumented, they quietly vanish without anyone noticing.
A 2015 climate change assessment by UC Davis projected that up to 90% of the Mount Lyell shrew’s habitat could be gone by 2080 due to climate change. Yet, before we photographed the species, no one was talking about this. If we had never documented it, it’s entirely possible the species could have gone extinct within our lifetimes without anyone raising the alarm. And this is happening in California—one of the most well-studied places in the world.
Another example is the Aplodontia rufa, a subspecies of mountain beaver found in Point Reyes National Seashore. Mountain beavers are fascinating rodents—not actually beavers at all but more closely related to squirrels. They belong to one of the most ancient rodent lineages known today.Point Reyes, just 30 minutes from San Francisco, has its own unique subspecies of mountain beaver, yet few people know about it. That same climate change assessment that covered the Mount Lyell shrew predicted that this subspecies is almost certain to go extinct within the next 100 years due to climate change. There have been a few photos of it in the past, but in 2022 we captured the first-ever high-quality footage of this subspecies. Hardly anyone has studied or documented it.
